5 Reasons Why Home Selling Needs a Technology Disruption

by Suzanne Appel

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be paying strangers to take me from place to place and requesting rides on my phone I would have been in shock – for a second – and then excited by the idea. I’m passionate about the intersection of technology and efficiency. Of course the taxi business needed to be fixed. You could never find one when you needed one (not in LA or the Valley at least)! And we’ve seen amazing improvements in healthcare, travel, and investing- all due to technology. So why has real estate lagged behind?

Here are 5 reasons why residential real estate needs a technology disruption:

1. Agent efficiency=lower fees. When homeowners sell, we want to profit or in the least, recoup every last penny on our investment. But when you tack the usual 5 to 6% real estate commission onto a sale, that’s not easy. Advances in technology allow agents to be more nimble (and help to reduce agent error), but most real estate companies don’t take advantage of new technologies and commissions stay high. REX is able to charge only 2%* because technology does much of our agents’ legwork for us while we can focus on client service.

2. Better marketing. If you could sell homes faster using big data why wouldn’t you? REX’s marketing goes around the MLS to reach buyers directly using the latest marketing technology to target real, live homebuyers on places like Zillow and Google. REX uses smart, direct and cost-effective marketing to drive traffic to each listing through proprietary data-driven algorithms. Smarter marketing enables us to sell homes faster, while avoiding buy-side agent commissions of 2-3%. Who needs the MLS when you have the Internet?

3. More enjoyable process. In an era where you can get just about anything delivered to your door in 24 hours, why is real estate still stuck in the dark ages? With REX, it’s not. We provide the benefits of a full-service broker combined with deep online marketing expertise. Also on our website, buyers can send a message, question or preliminary offer directly to the seller and sellers can negotiate right back. That’s just one of the ways REX’s technology fits with people’s on-the-go lifestyles.

4. Saving time. Many parts of the typical real estate transaction are inefficient. For instance, the simple act of scheduling a showing the old way might require several phone calls and can take days to coordinate. Businesses have been using calendar-scheduling software for decades, yet the Real Estate industry still relies on the buyer calling their agent, who calls the seller’s agent, who calls the seller, and so on. At REX, our seamless interface makes scheduling a showing as easy as ordering lunch, which means you still have time to order lunch.

5. All the paperwork in one place. With so many transactions happening online these days, it’s odd that so much of the traditional real estate process involves piles and piles of paper. What if all the agreements, escrow documents and legal paperwork were kept neatly online and available when the buyer or seller wanted to reference or sign them? Taking humans out of the document-shuffling business reduces error and confusion. We would like to see many of these documents move to digital formats where they could help educate the signer, answer questions easily, track your progress and be more time-efficient.

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*minimum fee of $9,500 ©2016 REXCalBRE# 01976010